Cancer Research Talk

David Wiseman from CR-UK came to talk about his career and his work at Cancer Research. Fascinating because he was able to relate his enthusiasm about T-cells and his experience of doing his research. But also to say why he moved on from the lab. It really made the point about how linear career progress is not necessarily the way it works.

He showed us the internal workings and structure of CR-UK and a sense of the culture of a health charity – as well as the benfits of the scheme he was on.

He had done his degree, then a masters abroad, then a PhD and then went off to teach English abroad for a few years. He had only recently come round to the ideas we are familiar with about career and personal development, and I could see how someone very focussed on the lab and biology might find that stuff a bit ‘fluffy’.

Here is an idea I am going to use: career development through lobster pots.

Lobster pots are pieces of experiences and skill that you leave. You return to them to see if they have caught a lobster. Its not exactly ‘career planning’  but it is about storing potential opportunity traps. Its an idea I am going to use.

The attendance was not bad – a room full – just under 30 of the the 40+ who said they were coming. Some of those who could not make it actually emailed their apologies -  a nice touch – most of these were, I suspect, postdocs.

Someone asked directly how old he was. I am getting old or is that just not acceptable? The questioner (an  ‘older’ man) seemed to be saying that some form of ageism must be in operation. There wasn’t. David did disclose his salary – but I am not sure if he was asked – I think he just volnteered it.

Delicious site

Did a training course on the Bookmark sharing site Delicious last year and did not quite understand how to use it. Then a request from a student led the way. He wanted a lisiting of opportunities in Social Science Research. Actually jobs.ac.uk carries most of these but not all. So I have bookmarked the sites of other opportunities – given them a Kings tag and advised students to search the site using this tag.

I explained this to Jeff who got very excited about it ( well, it was Jeff) and saw real possibilites for his work too. As he saw it, no snippet of information need ever be lost ever again.

I am wondering whether to use this for other groups in the college – a Humanities collection of bookmarks for instance, or physical sciences.

Researcher Development Framework

The New Researcher Development Framework is in the final phase of consultation.

http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/Vitae_ResearchersSkills_Oct09.pdf

 

It is more comprehensive and detailed than the Joint Skills Statement that it replaces and subsumes.

 

It groups the qualities ‘skills’, ‘competences’ into 4 ‘Domains’

 

The neutral word ‘Descriptors’ is being used in place of the working term ‘attributes’ that people may have seen in earlier drafts. Attributes was itself a response to criticisms of the word ‘skills’

 

The domains re-order the JSS groupings.

 

The new element is that the descriptors relate to growing and changing ‘skills’ throughout the ‘phases’ of a career. Five phases are identified from ‘New Researcher’ to ‘Eminent Researcher’

 

	New R	R	Established R	Advanced R	Eminent R
Professional and Intellectual Knowledge Cognitive Creativity
Personal Effectiveness Qualities Self organising Career
Research Organisation and Governance Conduct Project management Funding and resources
Impact and Influence communicating Teams and leadership Context Application

 

Each box has a brief text and ‘beneath’ this text is a richer array of material derived from the research  process where researchers themselves were describing their job.

 

Vitae and the development team led by Pam de Nicolo describe the RDF as ‘a tool for supporting and promoting personal and professional development’ and seemed less comfortable with the notion of it being an ‘appraisal’ tool – no doubt because of the internal political issues around appraisal.

EMBL – European Bioinformatics Institute Open Day

3/11/09 Notes

EBI is the Bioinformatics wing of EMBL the European Microbiology Laboratory

Voyage of discovery to the ‘Genome Campus’ at Hinxton just south of Cambridge. The site is shared with the Sanger institute which unlike EBI does have wet labs.

The day was mainly targeted at Masters students with a view to introducing and promoting the PhD scheme. Manchester University sent a whole group of students from their Bio-informatics course on the day.

We learnt about the way that Biology was changing with what was described as a ‘tsunami’ of data from studies not just of individual genes and enzymes but of entire biological systems and sequences. EBI acts as a depository for this data and is committed to making it freely available to researchers. They are guardians not owners of the data. Some of this colleaction is integrated with the peer review and publication process.

EMBL has 1400 staff – 1100 of them scientists on sites in Germany, France, Italy and UK. It has to bid for its funding streams (like everyone else). It is an intergovernmental research organisation (similar to CERN)

EBI provides services to the scientific community but also does its own research. There are 7 research groups and 2 new ones are in the process of setting up.

The interview process for joining the PhD programme lasts for 3-5 days – can involve travel between the various European sites – all of which is paid for.

65% of PhD alumni stay in science.

PhDs are successful in publishing at least one paper during their PhD and the average is 2.

The PhD is 3.5 – 4 years.

Application is by self-selection – you do not have to be recommended.

The key here is a relish for interdisciplinarity

Postdocs are recruited on a more ad-hoc basis though there is a programme of Interdisciplinary postdocs called EIPODs which recruits about 20+ annually. Career for life? No-one can work at EMBL for more than 9 years!

The Gendering of Careers Advice

Is Guidance just for girls? i have done quite a lot of student contact this week and most of that has been with females.

Monday: Time Management skills: of 16 students no more than 3 male

Interviews – 2 women

 

Tuesday: Careers Fair – could not really tell here but I am pretty sure women were in the majority.

Wednesday Guys: interviews – 2 women

Third year PhD induction: about 50 attendees – a ‘preponderance of Women’

Presentation skills training – 10 students – 1 male.

Thursday: Time management – 8 attenders – all female

IOP interviews 4 – 1 of them male

Friday interview: a female.

Is it the old adage: When a man wants to find the way he drives around till he finds it -  a woman will ask the way.

Or to put it another way, sisters are doing it with advice and guidance.

 

 

Who attends training?

Answer: the best trained people. I was talking to a consultant this week about attendance at RDP sessions. She observed that – from her experience – voluntary approaches to training mean that the people who really need the training don’t go. They do not know what they do not know.

I remeber seeing someone who had just delivered a presentation at his schools research showcase. He had not won a prize -which may be relevant – but he said: Its all bullshit, isn’t it?  Actually, this individual had pretended to know an answer to a question at the end of this talk – and had looked slightly foolish when this became apparent. So I thought ( but disappointingly didn’t say)  ITS not bullshit – but what you said WAS. This chap will not be doing presentation training- though he clearly needed it.

Forms of compulsion have been tried, but are rather a blunt instrument. Some Phd students are not really students at all but experienced professionals for whom the Phd is part of a broader careers strategy. Requiring these to do things appropriate to someone straight from their bachelors is probably not very smart. Nevertheless, you do see such people on the training courses; no matter how good they are they see the need to get better.

Feedback

Dear Terry

thank you for your seminar on PDP last Monday, it was really helpful and inspiring.

I never put negative feedback in my blog, but often put positive feedback. By contrast, in the dark recesses of my mind negative feedback makes an indelible imprint and positive feedback blows awy like ash in the breeze.

Freebie Training course

 We got two places on a new training programme offered by a new company who are hoping to train students interested in Investment Banking. We don’t really approve of money-making courses aimed at impecunious students – not a great business model either i can’t help but feel: “why not market this product to people who have no  money and large debts”

Any way the students loved it. See below

BHS Student

The IB session was brilliant. It was an excellent day course and I have learnt a lot, not just about the world of finance but what is expected as an interviewee. In addition, it was excellent knowing the wealth of experience, advice and backing there was. Not just from the teacher but his collgues who all work in specalist fields.

 

As I have a biological background, my knowledge of IB was very limited but over the course of a day my knowledge greatly increased.

 After the course I believe working in IB or management consultancy is the right direction for me to go.

 Thank you for passing on my name and helping me get on the course.

 

PSE Student

The IB session was brilliant – I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in finance. Thank you very much for giving me that opportunity.

 Thank you also for keeping me updated on the events (and if it’s possible, I’d appreciate the continuing support & information).

Source Event

Last Friday was devoted to Nature’s science careers fair and conference. I was quite pleased to be invited to speak at the fair – some sort of recognition of what i have been doing here at King’s. Also some recognition of the role that professional careers advice can play in supporting the career management of researchers. Well done us – The Careers Group and King’s College Graduate school. 

Chairing my sesion was Tristram Hooley of Vitae. Tristram is moving onto head the Careers Research Unit at Derby University. So our paths might cross again in that context.

I went to session on bid-writing given by Tony Woods of the Wellcome Trust. Strongly recommend people to listen to the pod-cast: lots of very common sense points about bid writing. It reminded me of the sorts of things we say about CV’s. He reckoned that he could tell in about 80% of cases whether the bid would get funded within about 30 seconds; a bit scary if you think that it could take 6 months to put a bid together. Its all in the project summary. What is the research question, will the activities proposed answer that question. Use the classic SMART objectives.

A UCL lecturer gave a very personal account of the unpredictabilty of a Research career which in her case spanned a number of separate disciplines and roles and a many countries. She was a Marie Curie fellow.

There was a talk form Merck serono about Clinical trials management, and then a mad presentation by the brilliant William Bains. He had the audience in stitches though a couple of very strait-laced people did leave in the middle with very concermed looks on their faces.

The apparently rambling talk covered a steely analytical brain that was determined to have some FUN. We started with Isaac Asimov and electric trainsets, silicon, the cost of filing a patent (30 quid!), the importance of the confidentiality agreements, science as a personality defect (“How many of you are scientists?” Forest of hands. “Well half of you are wrong and the other half have my deepest sympathy”, how to lose 12 grand ( he did it his way). He is the Eddie Izzard of Biotechnology start-ups. He is that good.

Vitae Conference – canoes and canowledge

Fragment of memory: The natives of a small pacific island need to make canoes to fish and trade. They could make a canoe in a few hours, but they don’t.They take several days. They eat, they celebrate, they spin it out. You see, for them. ItS NOT JUST ABOUT THE CANOES.

I have just returned from a canoe making at Wawick University. It was good. I guess I bring back some knowledge, but mainly I met canoe makers, and now I know that I am not alone in my canoe. I have a paddle and I know how to use it. Each paddle stroke has the force of a 100 other paddlers, which is good because at my age my paddle stroke has been weakening, my fingers losing their power to grip.

There is a knowledge overload problem at conferences – loads of new stuff / too little time to process it. And for me, no processing means little remembering. I met some peope at session 1 whom I never saw subsequently – or perhaps I did but did not recognise them. And were the 2 facilitators both pregnant – or was that the way their tops hung over their tummies.

‘Plenaries’ is a lovely word and we had – new to me – half plenaries. Should that have been semi-plenaries really? Honestly, a classical education can ruin your life. Cavernous rooms where several hundred people sat around enormous circular tables. A great way to accidentally start talking to people, even though you fail to remember their names or what they said, or what you said, or what they looked like. Face recognition – is there anything I can do about it?

 

What about all this moving betwen classrooms frequently in the course of a packed day? What does it remind you of? School. That was what school was like. Difference being that in conferences they put fairly unpleant coffee at the back of the room and no-one misbehaved. Conferences are places for swots.

The social events are always a trial for me – being as i am in the bottom third of the networking capabilities population.

(to be continued….